Hormones And Your Waistline

Hormones tell your body to feel hungry or full, to burn fat or store it, feel energized or feel tired. They even have effects on your mood and tell you when to exercise or just relax. The good news is that you can make these hormones work in your favor to lose weight. So take advantage of your female hormones to manage your appetite, weight and figure.

Hormone Ghrelin

Your arch enemy, the ghrelin hormone is the hunger hormone, urging you to eat. Skip a meal and the level of your ghrelin hormone rises making you ravenous making it impossible for you to resist any food that comes into sight.

Ghrelin level is high in the mornings since you have not eaten anything while sleeping. So skipping breakfast in the morning is not a good idea. Instead fuel yourself and keep this hormone at rest if you are on a weight lossprogram.

What type of food you eat is equally important. A high protein meal lowers ghrelin level more than high-fat and high carbohydrate meals. Eat a high-protein breakfast like whey-free protein shakes and incorporate protein in all your meals to keep ghrelin suppressed.

Hormone Leptin

The fat cells produce many hormones one of them being leptin. Leptin plays a crucial role in appetite control and tells the body when to stop eating acting as an appetite suppressor. But as you grow older you become leptin resistance.

To raise your leptin level, eat an omega 3 rich diet, like mackerel, salmon and sardines, and also increase your intake of Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) which stimulates the production of leptin.Ensure that you get your complete 7 hours of sleep at night as lack of sufficient sleep also lowers the level of leptin and increases the level of ghrelin, which will urge you to eat more.

Hormone Cortisol

This hormone is responsible for your belly fat just as much as stress is responsible for secretion of this hormone. Anytime you are under stress the body produces the stress hormone cortisol which leaves you craving for high-sugar or high-carb foods to help you reduce your tension. It compels you to hold on to your visceral fat, which is the fat around your belly, during tense situations.

Cortisol’s fat storing ability can be countered by cutting down coffee when you are under stress. Caffeine mixed with stress makes your cortisol level high and keeps it high for a longer time.

Hormone Serotonin

Just as cortisol acts as a stress hormone, serotonin acts as a calming hormone. Being a natural appetite suppressant, it helps you to suppress the craving for food and can work miracles during your weight loss program.

So enrich your diet as much as you can with asparagus, spinach and folate-rich lentils. These vegetables are rich in vitamin B which your brain uses to produce serotonin and help you lose weight.

Hormone Insulin

Sugar laden food products and sugary drinks skyrockets your blood sugar level. The body responds to this by secreting insulin, the hormone which pulls the extra glucose from the bloodstream. Insulin stores the excess calories which you get by overeating sweets and pasta as fat.

Cut down sugary products which causes spikes in your blood sugar. Soft drinks are the greatest blood sugar spikers and your enemy during your weight loss program. Cut them out of your life. Replace white bread with whole-grain bread which contains fiber that will make you fill fuller. Fibers slow down the process of absorption of the sugar into the blood stream. Maintain your insulin and glucose levels by spacing out your meals and snacking at regular intervals.

Hormone Irisin

Irisin is released by your muscle tissue when you are exercising and makes your hateful white fat behave like the calorie-burning brown fat. Irisin also helps in reducing insulin resistance.

Exercising can get you to produce more of this fat-burning hormone. Lower temperatures also increase the levels of irisin and will make your white fat behave like the brown fat and shifting your metabolic rate causing weight loss.

Hormone Adiponectin

This is the hormone which tells your body to burn fat; the more of this superb hormone that you have in your bloodstream the more are the chances of you losing your fateasily. But what is frustrating is that the more fat that you have the lesser is the level of this hormone. So boost your adiponectin hormone with magnesium intake with pumpkin seeds and green leafy vegetables.

The key to losing weightis taking control of your hormones; this will help you to control your food cravings, reduce your hunger, elevate your energy and increase your metabolism leading you to reduce your calories automatically.